Anturis System Monitoring Package Quickly Discovers Server Problems

REVIEW: Anturis is a system monitoring product that keeps watch over your servers. It is designed for small and medium-sized businesses, and eWEEK’s tests found that it works well for its target market.

In the world of cloud management, there are many levels of products available—those that integrate closely with Amazon Web Services, for example, and those that are more general purpose that can monitor any site.
I've spent a lot of time with the bigger ones that integrate with AWS and are clearly targeted mostly at big corporations. But recently I came across a brand-new one called Anturis that's more general purpose and built with small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in mind. From what I've seen so far, Anturis stands up well to the big players in the business.
As of this writing, Anturis is still in beta, and the company, which is also named Anturis, hasn't released a pricing strategy yet. However, the company assured me that there will always be a free version. That's enticing. And my expectation based on the target market is that the prices will be well within reach for smaller businesses, unlike some of the competition.
Anturis has a lot of features, more than I can cover in a single review. So in this review I'm sharing my experiences with a few of those features.

One thing to note about Anturis is the experience of the management team. One of the co-founders is Serguei Beloussov, who is founder and former CEO of Parallels and remains as chairman of its board. He also co-founded backup company Acronis along with two others partners, Max Tsypliaev and Ilya Zubarev. Clearly, the Anturis team has experience in IT systems.

Starting Out
When you first create an account on the Anturis site, a window pops up asking you how you want to get started. You can monitor a Web server, a MySQL database, server hardware and operating system, an email server or a user experience (I'll explain that one shortly), or you can set up a custom component (again, more on that shortly).
I initially chose a Web server to monitor, picking my own Website that I use for my consulting and training. It's not a huge Website, but would let me see how the features work. I initially set up the monitoring the last day of February, and it's been running ever since.
Setting up the monitoring is a snap. You give the monitor a name and click through a wizard. You provide a URL and the method of monitoring—either HTTP, Ping or both. Then you click Finish.